More Disinformation From the Wall Street Journal
They Are Promoting Extremely Expensive Drugs When Cheaper Ones Are More Effective
Here’s the Wall Street Journal headline. New Diabetes Drugs Like Ozempic Are Changing how patients Are Treated. After years of recommending the generic drug metformin, American Diabetes Association says doctors could give a newer medicine first.
Perfect! What a great example of everything that is wrong with American healthcare. Here is a quote directly from the article: “The newer drugs cost more than metformin, however, and some patients might not be able to afford the out-of-pocket costs and need to go with metformin, doctors said. Ozempic, for example, lists for nearly $900 a month, and Jardiance comes in at about $590 a month.”
Even if you have no insurance, you can take your Metformin prescription to Walmart and get it filled for $4 a month. No, you did not misread that—four dollars a month. More importantly, you can buy our entire diabetes management protocol at Walmart for $31 dollars a month.
Ozempic costs $900 a month and metformin costs $4. Ozempic might be worth your consideration if it produced much better results on preserving your health, but it does not. Most patients with type 2 diabetes don’t die of a high sugar. They die of cardiovascular disease. This comment on the reduced risk of cardiovascular with Ozempic comes from the New England Journal of Medicine.
“This lower risk was principally driven by a significant (39%) decrease in the rate of nonfatal stroke and a nonsignificant (26%) decrease in nonfatal myocardial infarction, with no significant difference in the rate of cardiovascular death.”[TM1]
Ozempic had no effect on cardiovascular death. Metformin alone has proven to reduce the risk of dying from heart disease. Johns Hopkins Medicine published this paper in 2016, which states “204 studies involving more than 1.4 million people suggests that metformin, the most frequently prescribed stand-alone drug for type 2 diabetes, reduces the relative risk of a patient dying from heart disease by about 30 to 40 percent compared to its closest competitor drug, sulfonylurea.”
The well-documented UKPDS study also reported “Patients allocated metformin, compared with the conventional group, had risk reductions of 32% for any diabetes-related endpoint, 42% for diabetes-related death), and 36% for all-cause mortality.” This study also reported a 39% reduction in heart attack. Metformin is at least as effective as Ozempic in keeping you from having a heart attack and it is more effective in preventing death. And it is 99.5% LOWER IN COST.
But that is not the ultimate point. Preventing diabetic complications is not about one drug. It is about a comprehensive treatment strategy that combines diet, exercise, and the most effective medications to prevent premature death, cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease.
When you combine the inexpensive medications in the picture above for just $31 per month, patients with type 2 diabetes don’t reduce heart attack by one-fourth as with Ozempic. They reduce heart attack four-fold! And this collection of safe, effective and low-cost medications reduce every other terrible thing that goes with diabetes to a similar extent.
That is why this disinformation is so horrible. The big drug companies take in a ton of money. They can promote their products on television, the internet and print constantly. I see Ozempic commercials all the time. I never see an advertisement for the optimal medical therapy protocol These treatments are proven, and they are inexpensive.
But there is no money to be made there, only less cost and better health. There is a ton of money to be saved and every American should have access to this highly effective treatment at much lower cost. You are being hoodwinked.
Oh, and one more thing! Novo Nordisk makes Ozempic, and they are founding corporate sponsors of the Pathway to Stop Diabetes at the American Diabetes Association. Novo Nordisk, Lilly, and Sanofi together contributed 53.6 million dollars to the ADA. Of course, the ADA says you can use Ozempic first! Drug companies are the most powerful lobby in the US. Conflicts of interests are everywhere and they have a huge impact on American families and non-medical businesses who are self-insured for medical costs. No wonder Americans don’t trust our institutions. They are not serving them. The good ol’ boys are at it still.
yes, this is typical of how the health racket operates. However, the whole issue is moot on many levels, when you realize that we long since know in lifestyle medicine that the majority of chronic illnesses, which are the cash cows for big pharma are preventable or reversible with a lifestyle mediciine regime, including a whole foods, plant-based diet. See https://nutritionstudies.org, https://ijdrp.org/index.php/ijdrp, and https://lifestylemedicine.org
Just love your articles!